10 WAYS TO EXCEL AS A

NEW PRODUCER
#1: QUANTITY OVER QUALITY

The best way to rene your craft is to create a huge volume of work. Not to
create the most perfect piece you can, but to create many pieces of work.

Ira Glass

When I started preaching quantity over quality two years ago, it stirred some
controversy. People thought it attacked the integrity and sanctity of art
(whatever that means), and that to focus on just nishing a lot of music
without a serious concern for quality was completely missing the point of
music production.

But that's not the case. In fact, if you optimize for quantity over quality, you'll
end up getting both. Here's why...

You learn faster

We learn through repetition; through seeing variations of similar or related

problems time and time again, and then learning how to solve them.

How can you develop a skill without repetition? In music, how can you learn
how to write good melodies unless you consistently practice writing
melodies?

Producer A spends his rst 3 months trying to perfect only one song. He
suers from a lack of repetition and variation: he writes a melody only once,
he writes a chord progression only once, and he arranges a song only once.

Producer B spends his rst 3 months making 3 songs a week. He will

progress rapidly. He writes a melody 40 times. He writes a chord progression
40 times. He arranges a song 40 times. He's gone through a lot of repetition
seen variations of similar problems over and over again and had to learn
how to solve them.

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At the end of the 3 months, who's going to be making better music?

Producer B. By a long shot.

You learn faster

Over 70% of producers (internal EDMProd data) struggle to nish tracks. Not
just new producers, but those at every stage.

One of the reasons why people struggle to nish music is that they haven't
built the habit of nishing. Their default modethe path of least resistance
is to start a project and abandon it.

Now, not all projects need to be nished. It's the nature of things to come up
with bad ideas that aren't worth nishing.

However, if you're a new producer, you're in a privileged position. You're a

blank slate. Building the habit of nishing is much easier for you than it is for
someone who's built the habit of non-nishing.

So, I recommend that you adopt the quantity over quality approach and
churn out as much music as you can. Finish every idea, even if it sucks.

Further reading:

1. Why Quantity Should be Your Priority

2. The Impact Formula: New Evidence on the Factors that Lead to

Breakthroughs (hints at the importance of nishing)

3. Jack Conte Work to Publish

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#2: USE DEEP WORK STRATEGIES

Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free

concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These
eorts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.

Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often

performed while distracted. These eorts tend to note create much new
value in the world and are easy to replicate.

As creatives, we need to do deep work. It's the only way to make real
progress.

This means you need to work against your natural inclination to check
Facebook. It means turning your phone OFF when producing. Closing the
door. Making yourself unavailable for a few hours. In other wordsreducing
the likelihood of being distracted.

Why? Because the best thing you can do for yourself as a producer is to
develop the skill of focus. Intense, sickening, tunnel-vision focus.

When you develop this kind of focus, you become more productive by orders
of magnitude. You can get done in two hours what takes most producers
eight hours.

Cal Newport, author of Deep Work, outlines several strategies for doing this
type of focused work in his book. If you're wondering which approach works
best for you, I recommend reading it.

Note: Deep work is hard, but it's also incredibly rewarding. You'll be amazed
at what you can achieve when you force yourself to sit down and focus (as an
example, I wrote the second edition of The Producer's Guide to Workow &
Creativity in 30 days, writing 3 hours per day).

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#3: EMBRACE THE STRUGGLE

One of my favorite books is called Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a

Better Life by Navy SEAL Eric Greitens. He shares the following advice:

"You don't have to push yourself to a new max every day. That's a recipe for
injury. But you do have to push yourself. You do have to step beyond the
boundary of your past experience. You do have to regularly and consistently
pursue excellence at the edge. And you especially have to do it when you nd that
the world is giving you excuses to sit and do nothing."

Making any kind of art is dicult. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either a
complete newbie who is still in fantasy-land and thinks everything is a
breeze, or someone who has spent their whole life consuming art and never
attempted to create it.

But struggle isn't a bad thing, so stop thinking it is. Instead, create in your
mind a healthy relationship with struggle. Know that doing hard things
(nishing that song that's been sitting on your hard drive for months on end,
turning the melody that's merely okay into something great), is necessary for
progress and actually leads to a deep, lasting satisfaction.

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#4: SET GOALS

Goals won't make you a better producer. Setting goals isn't "putting in the
work."

But goals are helpful. They give you direction. They help guide your learning,
which is essential if you want to excel as a producer.

The rst question you need to ask is, "What do I want?"

Do you want to headline Ultra? Do you want to be respected in the music

production industry for your technical abilities? Or do you want to enter the
world of commercial/lm scoring?

Even though your goals will probably change over time, it's crucial that you
have a general idea of where you want to go.

Why?

Because dierent goals require dierent learning paths, and music

production as a whole is far too vast a eld to master in its entirety.

If you want to headline Ultra, then your learning path is going be dierent to
the person who wants to be respected as a technical producer, and even
more dierent to the producer who wants to score lms.

So, work out what you want to be, and then set a big goal. Maybe your big
goal is to headline at Ultra.

Now, set some more immediate goals: What do you want to achieve this
year? This month? This week?

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Here's an example of how I might set my goals up:

Big goal: score a big-budget lm

Year goal: commission a song for an indie video game

Month goal: nish two scores

Week goal: analyze the Interstellar theme song (the composition in

particular)

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#5: CREATE SYSTEMS

Why do so many people fail to stick to their new year's resolutions?

They start with the best intentions but within a few weeks they've quit. They
go to the gym a few times and then stop.

Goals in isolation do not drive action. They're simply a starting point.

What you need in addition to well thought-out goals is a system for achieving
those goals. Something (or multiple things) you can do every day to move
yourself closer.

For instance, the month goal that I set above is technically a system for the
year goal. If I write two scores a month, by the end of the year I'll probably
have one that's good enough to be commissioned for a game.

But it's wise to develop a system for achieving the monthly goal, because
writing two scores a month is no easy task. My system might be 2 hours of
composition daily + 1 hour of analysis. If I stick to thisdo it day in and out
despite how uninspiring it isI will likely achieve my goals.

Further reading:

1. James Clear: Systems vs Goals

2. Scott Adams - How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big
(Chapter Six Goals Versus Systems)

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#6: BEWARE OF THE DK EFFECT

"The DunningKruger eect is a cognitive bias in which low-ability individuals

suer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability as much higher
than it really is.

As a new producer, it's crucial that you're aware of this. If you're not, you'll:

1. Spend too much time promoting yourself and your music

prematurely. Time that could be spend practicing your craft and
actually getting better.

2. Have a false perception of how hard the craft of music production

is. You'll think it's easier than it actually is. As a result, you won't put
as much eort into learning.

3. Develop an ego, which will aect your reputation and make it

harder to form relationships with other producers.

Stay humble. Realize that it takes consistent eort over time to become
good.
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#7: LEARN DELIBERATELY

Most producers don't plan how they learn. I think this is a mistake.

In my experience, the producers who I've worked with and coached that
make an eort to learn deliberately, excel. They progress very, very quickly.

The best example that comes to mind is my friend John Lavido, who I've
been coaching for several months now.

He wanted to get better at songwriting. He wanted to make catchy music. So,

he set up a system for learning how to do so. He'd analyze and recreate the
chord progression and melody from a popular song (say, a Calvin Harris
track), and then create 10 original ideas based o the formula that that song
used.

And that is how you learn deliberately. You set a goal, think about how you
can design a plan to achieve it, and work through that plan.

Think back to your goals. What do you need to learn in order to achieve
them? If your goal is to get better at sound design, create a plan to
deliberately learn sound design (e.g., reverse-engineer 5 professionally-made
presets a day). This does require a little bit of thinking, and it's easy to
overcomplicate things, so focus on simplicity when designing your learning
plan.

Singular focus

It's much better to have a singular focus than to split your time between 3-5
things. If you're trying to learn sound design, music theory, mixing,
arrangement, structure, and music marketing all at once, you're going to go
slowly.

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Instead, I recommend working in bursts of 2-4 weeks, focusing on learning
just one thing. When you do this, it becomes much easier to do deep work
and get into ow (thus reaping the benets of increased speed). It's also
much easier to plan.

If your goal is to get better at sound design, then just focus on that for the
next 2-4 weeks. Nothing else. Don't write any melodies, don't work on any
music, just focus on learning sound design.

This article from Cal Newport explains why this is a good idea. Also, this
article from Billy Murphy exposes the benets of having a singular focus.

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#8: LEARN MUSIC THEORY

You don't need to know music theory to write good music. There are plenty
of successful producers who have no idea what a seventh chord is, but still
use it in their music in a way that sounds good.

It's not essential to learn, but it's damn helpful. Here are three reasons why:

1. It allows you to be more creative

Sometimes, you'll have an idea in your head that you want to actualize in
your DAW. Perhaps it's a certain feeling you want to invoke in the listener.
Maybe it's an interesting transition from one chord progression or melody to
another.

If you know music theory, your ability to actualize that idea is strengthened.
You have a better understanding of how to go about it. If you don't know
music theory, you're going in blind. Which leads me to my next point...

2. It saves you a lot of time

Trial and error is an essential part of learning music production, but you
don't really want to experience it unnecessarily.

If you don't know music theory, you're essentially composing through trial
and error. You'll hear that something sounds bad, but you won't know why. It
will take you a long time to get to a point where you can consistently write
good music.

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3. You can learn more from other music

Analyzing music is an incredibly valuable discipline (more on that in a

moment), and knowing music theory makes it even more valuable.

When you know music theory, you can listen to a song and pick up on why it
sounds the way it does. Why it's catchy. Why it sounds dark, interesting,
uncomfortable, or happy.

And you'll make connections between things. You'll start to use ideas that
you nd through the analysis of other music in your own original music,
because you know why, when, and in which context those ideas work.

Want to learn theory? I recommend starting with the Hooktheory book.

Alternatively, you can download EDMProd's free Music Theory: The TL;DR
Version.

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#9: ANALYZE OTHER MUSIC

The best writers read a lot of books.

The best public speakers spend time studying other great public speakers.

You'll see this in almost every eldpeople learning from those who came
before them. As Isaac Newton once said, "If I have seen further, it is by
standing on the shoulders of giants."

There is an innite amount of music to study and learn from. So incorporate

it into your learning routine.

Further reading:

1. The Necessity of Intentional Listening

2. The Best Way to Improve as a Producer? Remake Other Music

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#10: READ MORE BOOKS

You're not "too cool" to read books.

Books make you smarter. They help you think about things. They lead to new
insights and better understanding. The only point at which reading becomes
harmful is when it becomes a replacement for actually doing the work.

I've compiled a list of books I recommend for producers. Some of them are
directly related to music production, and others are more geared towards
creative people in general.

Check out the book list here.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Im Sam Matla.

I run EDMProd, a place where I help

electronic music producers make better
music and overcome creative problems.

As an educator and author, over the past

three years Ive sold courses and ebooks
to over 5,000 producers. Many of them
have had great results.

You can reach me via email

(sam@edmprod.com) or Twitter
(@sammatla)

MORE RESOURCES FROM EDMPROD:

EDM Foundations

The Producers Guide to Workow & Creativity

Start to Finish: Future House Edition

Start to Finish: Uplifting Trance Edition

Start to Finish: Progressive House Edition

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